1. Sometimes I cook all fancy! I'm home visiting my folks, and my dad wanted to grill because he's been watching this grilling cooking show. But I basically don't eat meat except for fish, so we settled on tuna, because it doesn't stick to the grill. So this was yesterday's dinner:

2. Speaking of California, I often find staying with my parents somewhat frustrating (and helping my mom out with her work can be exceptionally frustrating).

But! Here are some of the things that California has in addition to fruit: It's-Its. Blue Bottle Coffee (<3<3<3). Tacos. Breakfast pastries at the Ferry Building. Boogaloo's amazing grilled plantain cakes. Persimmons from the tree in the backyard. Some friends I haven't seen in a while. Fan peoples. Thrift stores. An ocean.

3. There is going to be another Avatar: The Last Airbender (and Avatar: Legend of Korra) fanwork exchange over at white_lotus! I plan to ask for Korra/Chief Bei Fong, among other things, so it is basically guaranteed to include great things.

Anyway, if you are interested, there's a draft signup post to poke at (to make sure all your favorite characters are on the list!) and tomorrow there will be a draft rules post that take people's suggests from last year into account. And signups will start later this week!

As part of making it work this year, we've also made an AO3 collection for the challenge, so that people who want to play in an anon-slow-reveal challenge but also want to be able to edit their fanworks can play that way. People will still be able to just send us their fanworks and have them posted straight to the comm, but the AO3 thing should make it easier for people who are already using the AO3. (Plus we belatedly made a collection for last year, so if you want to you can submit your fanworks to the collection.)

4. Remember that top one hundred specfic works thing? I haven't forgotten it, I promise, I just got cranky when I organized everything for Condorcet voting on a website that said it would do it ... and then couldn't deal with 250 things in a list, Grr. And then I tried a bunch of other places, and they all would only do ten items or allow 50 voters or blahblah. I might end up just doing it in comments and uploading the data flat to a Condorcet calculator. (The short version of condorcet: it's sometimes called ranked-choice or instant-runnoff voting [though a lot of different methods end up being called these things, since the terms are used confusingly in news stories], and it's usually done for single-winner issues. It can be done for a multiple-winner issue, though, and I thought it would be fun because it would let people rank as many things as they wanted. It's a kind of neat alternative since it lets you rank things you hate low, and not have to do careful vote manipulation to make your vote "count." But APPARENTLY the javascript version of the Condorcet page crashes liek whoah.)

Hi! I am really excited about festivids, and I'm thrilled that you're making me a present in one of these tiny (or at least small) fandoms that we share! First and foremost, I want you to have fun and do festivids however you want to do it, and if that means totally ignoring this that is fine by me. If you want more information about me or what I like about the sources or music suggestions, read on, but don't take any of this letter as a strict guideline - I like all kinds of vids (including critiques) and I like surprises and I like these sources, so you're pretty sure to make something I'll like.

I'm fine with almost any rating or content - the only thing is that I'm phobic about needles, but I can usually watch them unless it's an extended slow-mo sequence.

Almost everything I requested is a safety fandom, so if you're panicking about what you matched on there are plenty of easy-to-ahem options!

It's a fanwork exchange for fandoms by chromatic creators featuring chromatic characters/people - there's more info in the official announcement post. And it's for all kinds of fanworks, vids and fic and art and icons and picspams and etc.

The good: I love a fanwork exchange! I love making something especially for someone else and getting something made especially for me. And I love the mods and the concept behind the exchange. And I really do need external pressure of some sort to actually post anything.

The bad: The schedule overlaps a lot with kink_bingo's schedule - all of the busiest KB modding times are also the important kaleidoscope times. But that won't mean I'll have no free time! But it probably will mean that I'm cranky and kind of tired of fannish things. It might feel more irritating than fun when I'm looking at an assignment next month. So I don't know.

The difficult: Nominations! People only get to nominate three fandoms, and there are so many cool things not currently on the list, and how would I decide what I want to nominate. I haven't been thinking about doing any multi-fandom exchanges, so I don't have a ticky-able list of Cool Things I Would Nominate For X. It's all just exclamation marks. Sleep Dealer! I want fanworks in that universe so much! Especially if they contain cool speculative fiction or threesomes! Janelle Monáe's Metropolis/Archandroid universe! All the Samuel Delany, all of it! (Except I still haven't read Dhalgren, whoops.) Game fandoms! Whale Rider, which I asked for for yuletide one year, but maybe glass_icarus is going to nominate it! Etc.

1. You guys, icepixie wrote The Heart's Compass, the Babylon 5 Delenn/Ivanova AU of my dreams, seriously, could I have had this show instead? It's a little awkward in places but, I mean, so was the show. And listen, it is a story where Delenn falls for Ivanova instead of Sheridan, early in the series, and it makes my heart happy.

(Especially since there are also a few drabbles and short vignettes over at the AO3, though most of them are about unrequited love.)

2. Don't know what to be this Halloween? Check out wtf should I be for Halloween, which contains as many costume ideas as there are articles on wikipedia. And puts "sexy" in front of all of them.

Since it's completely randomized, there are some really great options. This year I plan on going as a Sexy Fort Reliance Water Aerodrome, for example. (There's also the potential for fail, because of course there are many pages on wikipedia that really shouldn't be indexed with "sexy" in front of them; I didn't encounter anything faily when I clicked through, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.)

3. I frequently encounter images on tumblr that are unattributed or dewatermarked, and sometimes that makes me really sad -- I don't know if that photographer has a ton more pretty image, or what the original context was, or anything. But if I see something really great and I really really want to know if there's more by the same photographer, I look for the picture over at TinEye, a reverse image search engine. Sometimes it even works! Anyway this is a link to TinEye, which I think I was first linked to three years ago when their image index was even smaller; now I do sometimes have some success with them.

5. Apparently TVTropes is going to have to take down, move, rename, or mark as NSFW a lot of their sex and sexuality-related content because google ads noticed that ads are running on pages with mature content. And they might have to make registration mandatory to view sex/kink/fetish tropes, and they are planning to make registration mandatory for editing pages. I don't hang out there or anything, but it still makes me sad -- many of those pages are very useful for vidding/iconing/etc. Or for kink_bingo, where I have often used the TV Tropes pages for tentacles to find pictures or examples or video of canonical tentacles.

3. I actually kind of feel like I'm posting all the time right now, because I'm writing up kink_bingo related stuff: resources, posting template, accessability, kink wiki stuff about kinks X and Y and Z. But then I don't post it! Because it has to wait until round two is closed! So I keep being a little confused about what I've posted and where. *facepalm*

4. I'm sort of doing three weeks for dreamwidth all the time, since I'm not crossposting, but I thought this related meme was interesting: What kind of topics/entries would you like to see me posting about? Any particular questions you've always wanted to ask me but have resisted because the answer would be a huge essay? Ever want to wind me up and watch me go on a particular topic? Anything you've heard me say "I should write that entry about _________ I've been meaning to write" and have been patiently waiting for? (from telesilla)

So, a long time ago, I read zorrorojo's Just a Guy, a Highlander/Star Trek: Voyager crossover. Recently, thingswithwings and I were discussing the intriguing kinkiness of deaged fic -- where, even if the characters don't have sex when one of them is a kid, there's all of this interesting narrative focus on youth, on innocence, on John Sheppard needing to be trained to recognize love through being hugged a lot, on Blair Sandburg's tiny hands, on Rodney McKay's big eyes and trembling lips. Narrative kinks are intriguing! And I remembered this story, and went and tracked it down, and shared the kinky highlights with thingswithwings, and now I want to share it with you.

So, anyway, this story was totally one of my guilty pleasures in like 2001, and I really enjoyed it in a lot of ways even though the writing style is not my bag. And I think, now, that one of those ways was the narrative kink, the ageplay, the virginity stuff, that is never played out -- Chakotay and MacLeod never have sex with deaged Tom and Methos, though Tom and Methos have sex with each other in a sort of puppy pile way. But it's all there anyway, right, all the stuff about tiny hands and keeping Methos in line and breaking the rules and whatever, Methos's attempts to game MacLeod by acting out, it's a complete roleplay scenario. It's just that the sex never happens.

Anyway, this is a thing I've been thinking about lately, about fic with this sort of narrative kinkiness, where the author/reader get off but the characters don't: Simpson flogs Hornblower, who doesn't enjoy it, but we do; Blair is kidnapped and brainwashed; John Sheppard is forced to worship an alien god; Obi-Wan has to get nipple rings to go undercover; Mulder is branded by Cancer Man. Examples and other thoughts welcome, as always.

Me: There are already more people signed up for yuletide than there were last year. 1634!thingswithwings: Wow, that's more years than passed between the birth of Jesus Christ and the birth of Shakespeare!Me: ...thingswithwings: What? It's true!

2. I want a new term for a particular kind of pairing-fic. See, there's best friends!fic (Blair/Jim, Starsky/Hutch, Gus/Shawn) and there's what I think of as enemies!fic (Harry Potter/any Voldemort supporter, Mulder/Krycek, Johnny Smith/Stillson, John/Kolya) and then there's this other thing, this sort of sniping-but-on-the-same-side thing. And sometimes people call it enemies!fic, and I'm always a bit "huh?" because these guys aren't enemies. They're just not best friends! If one of them hasn't killed the other's mentor, if one of them isn't trying to bring about the apocalypse, if one of them isn't busy creating an evil clone army, it's just not the same! It's "sometimes we bicker" fic! And yet people keep telling me that it's the opposite of the bff fic, that if you don't write best friends this is the other option, and I am continually weirded.

Some example pairings that I thought of just now:- Psych, Shawn/Lassiter. Listen, they are both on the same side, neither of them has killed the other's father, they just kind of dislike each other. They both want to arrest guys! They sometimes work together! But not as much as Shawn and Gus.

- The Dead Zone, Johnny/Walt. They are kinda suspicious of each other, okay, and Walt sometimes thinks Johnny's a big weirdo, and they are both in love with the same woman, but ... not enemies. Not BFFs, either.

- Eureka, Jack Carter/Nathan Stark. They are both in love with the same woman (sigh) and they don't like each other but they, you know, save the world together a lot.

- The X-Files, Mulder/Skinner. They're on the same side -- well, most of the time, depending on what side Chris Carter thought Skinner was on today -- but they disagree sometimes. Mostly they do Stern Authority Figure/Snarky Subordinate. Like, in fic, when Skinner spanked Mulder, it was for How Dare You Break Into That Military Base Without Telling Me, I Worry About You reasons, not Damn You, Stop Trying to Take Over the World With Evil Robots reasons.

So what should I call this? Clearly "guys who kind of don't like each other and are a little bit snarky but neither of them killed the other one's father fic" is a little long. thingswithwings suggests "cantankerous acquaintance fic," which certainly gets at the part where these aren't guys who are BFFs and aren't srs enemies.

Like, is it just my fannish history? Is it just that I read Mulder/Krycek and Harry/Snape (when Snape was supposed to be evil)? I feel like these aren't the same things as what I'm used to calling enemies!fic. I want more archnemeses in my enemies!fic.

3. I am sad to say that Super Mario Galaxy has been rejected from yuletide -- the Mario universe was added to the list of ineligible franchises after nominations were over. I am full of woe, for I wanted to ask for cool genre-bending fic (Freudian meditations on Cosmic Mario! kinky Star Bunny fic!), and also because it means I wasted a nomination -- I went and looked up the fandom before I nominated, and was pretty sure that it would count as small enough on its own, and Mario wasn't on the franchise list. I could have nominated The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air instead! Or Uzak (Distant), where there should have been HUGS. I know that betrays the premise of the movie, but after I watched it, I wanted hugs. Or Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog, which was my favorite book when I was in junior high. (Finding out that Le Guin loved it, in that article, made me all starry-eyed. Ursula K Le Guin! Carol Emshwiller! Together! It was like, baby!eruthros does RPF.) So now I am a little sad.

Please don't take the fanfiction survey that is going around (the one with the big fancy banner).

Here is the deal: the people who wrote that survey pm'ed me, as one of the mods of kink_bingo, while I was out of the country. In their pm, they (unintentionally) made it quite clear that their intent in their project is to talk about human universals -- to use our fannish experience, our erotics and our desires, to reinforce ideas of universal, hard-wired, biological desire.

They are outsiders to fandom. They are outsiders to fanfiction. They are outsiders to slash. And they haven't tried to learn, or to understand, or to think about fannish communities. Instead, they have made assumptions about who we are, about what we read, about what we find hot; they plan to use those to explain what makes women tick, what our brains make us do.

They do not believe that culture mediates our desire at all1; they don't believe that we are shaped by our communities and our experiences; they want to put us into neat, biologically determined boxes. We declined to participate, and figured that was the end of it -- we didn't know that there was going to be a survey, which is why I'm posting publicly. (I'm going to put that pm, and the subsequent conversation thingswithwings and I had with them, under cut-tags at the end of this post if you're interested.)

All of those problems are present in the survey itself. If you read through the comments on their Q&A post, you'll see a number of people challenging the questions, the answers, and the ideas behind the survey. Reasons include heterosexist language, which presumes that anyone not marked as queer must be straight; the language of the questions about participants' sex, gender, and sexual orientation, which presumes that people are either male or female; and the language of their description of slash, which presumes that there is one definition of slash. torachan further explains some of those problems here.

The structure and activity of our subcortical circuits are shaped by neurohormones such as testosterone, estrogen, oxytocin, progesterone, and vasopressin; these circuits function differently in men and women. As cognitive neuroscientists, we draw upon a wide variety of empirical data sources to model these circuits, including brain imaging studies, primate research, cognitive science experiments, machine learning algorithms--and behavioral data. The Internet offers large, unprecedented sources of data on human activity: one of these data sets is fan fiction.

We're deeply interested in broad-based behavioral data that involves romantic or erotic cognition and evinces a clear distinction between men and women. Fan fiction matches this criteria perfectly.

Guys, that is their explanation of their project: that they want to look at how we are hard-wired different.

It's the same old sociobiological bullshit, the same old attempts to universalize and naturalize their ideas of gender roles, the same old approach that makes us nothing but a data set. Please don't take this survey.

If you have already taken this survey, I don't know what to tell you -- I'm sorry that I didn't post this earlier. I don't know what would happen if you demanded to have your answers taken out; I don't know what sort of IRB/human subjects research board preparations they have done.

I noticed some overlap between kink_bingo categories and cliche_bingo categories, and I thought it might be interesting to explore that overlap. So, I present here a list of kink_bingo categories that are also categories in cliche_bingo.

I may have missed some overlap in glancing over the list; if so, I'd be interested to know what they are.

So, this morning I was sitting in a cafe, doing some reading and sipping an iced soy latte. (Because it is apocalyptic weather here in the Bay Area, where we are worried about drought and about fires already in January.)

And Johnny Cash's Mercy Seat started playing. "Hee," I thought, because it always reminds me of lim's amazing John Sheppard vid I Am/Lamb.

So I'm listening to Johnny Cash tell me about a crime of which he's totally innocent, you know, and doing my crossword puzzle.

And then ... wtf? The next song on the playlist is Iron and Wine's Evening on the Ground. Or, as I think of it, hollywoodgrrl's Evening on the Ground. ALSO a John Sheppard vid, also awesome.

Seriously, guys, if I was not listening to some barrista's vid songs playlist, that she used to enjoy fannishness while at work, I don't know what was going on -- that's one heck of a coincidence: three genres, three eras, connected only as Awesome John Sheppard vids.

I should totally have asked the barrista on duty whose mix CD it was. I could've made a new fannish friend!

I've been rereading the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Whose Body. (I do a lot of rereading during the semester, because I can reread over several days and in five-minute increments without losing track of the plot. The number of times I have thus read Men at Arms and Gaudy Night does not bear thinking about.)

Anyway, in this reading, I came across a marvelous paragraph in the denouement. Lord Peter is visiting the man he now knows to be the killer, but he is pretending to be there for another reason, and the killer is pretending not to know he's in danger (while simultaneously trying to kill Our Hero). Lord Peter just reached out and prevented the villain from carrying out what was probably an attempt on Peter's life:

The silence was like a shock. The blue eyes did not waver; they burned down steadily upon the heavy weight lids below them. Then these slowly lifted; the grey eyes met the blue -- coldly, steadily -- and held them.

When lovers embrace, there seems no sound in the world but their own breathing. So the two men breathed face to face.

I have stolen this random links idea from svendra, because if I don't stick unrelated things at the bottom of my posts, I fail to share the awesomeness that is Alanis Morissette doing "my humps" with everyone. I mean, I feel like all my random links don't deserve single posts, so then the only people who see them are the people who are on IM when I find them. (If you still haven't seen the Alanis video, it's here. Also awesome. SERIOUSLY.)

So! graycastle and I have decided that we need to do a project. A very important project. A project that will represent the spirit and ideas of individual fandoms.

We want to find two-second clips from shows that say what those shows really mean. Ideally only one character.

This thought, see, was precipitated by me trying to explain the premise of the Sentinel, and then playing the first few minutes of the Sentinel, and then pausing it on a certain line to say "... well, actually, that kinda sums it up right there."

The line was Jim, talking to the SWAT guys at the beginning of the episode. He looked anxious and armed, and he said "Do you smell that?" That, my friend, is the Sentinel.

We decided that Fraser's first-came-to-Chicago was too obvious for due South, and graycastle voted for "Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray. If you don't mind." I voted for "Hi, dad. How're you?" "I'm dead, son. Other than that, do you mean?" Except it's two characters, woe.

And my Buffy choice is, of course, "All right, I get it, you're evil. Do we have to chat about it all day?"

So for reasons that were really no reasons at all, I was looking for this Star Trek: Voy/Seaquest crossover with a Harry Kim/Lucas Wolenczak pairing (no, really). I originally read it five or six years ago on the Belynda's Slash Archive/Complete Kingdom of Slash, back before the CKoS underwent revamping and ended up a weird interface and none of the original stories reuploaded (which is now an irrelevant complaint, as CKoS is kaput). Looking for the current location of something that random is ... not easy.

But! I found it! It is here, at Emerald Night, Cinder's current location. I waybacked CKoS, tracked down the original story, found the author's name (though not the text of the story, which oddly was not waybacked), googled that, found rec lists with her then-webpage, waybacked that (no luck; it was a dencity webpage, which means wayback has nothing), gambled that her current webpage have the same keywords as the dencity webpage, googled for that, and ta-da! (That is much more linear that original, which contained a number of sidetracks that petered out in the same sets of bad links.) All this, just to prove my memory right: it's actually a triple-crossover, since Lucas has a sekrit past with Adam Pierson. (Also, it is about as ridiculous as I remember. ETA: Also, apparently, there are WIP sequels to it in which Q turns Harry and Lucas into bunnies. Um. Also, the same author has a Sentinel/SG-1 story in which Daniel is referred to as a curly-haired anthropologist, which... no.)

Also, why is Seaquest not out on DVD? The first season was fun, even if it was basically underwater TNG.

And, having made it through lord alone knows how many Sentinel-bonding stories, I feel entitled to be random and post Funny IM Conversations. Because I know you all care what waywardwords and I think would happen if the actors in Top Gun were played by ducks, or what darthrami and I theorized about the NID's curtains. Or maybe just because I don't want to lose said randomness later.

And when darthrami was over, we briefly talked about the fandoms that could actually support curtainfic. Later, on lj:

eruthros: Also? Maybourne totally has a crush on Jack O'Neill.darthrami: :-)eruthros: Seriously! I mean, he's always calling from the Cayman Islands and wanting to know how Jack's doing...darthrami: ...darthrami: does he ask about curtains?eruthros: No.eruthros: Usually he asks about the NID and if they're all managing to stay disentangled from the Shadow Government sorta thing.darthrami: ahhhhdarthrami: does he ask about the shadow government's curtains? ( NID Curtainfic )

I'm not really on Sentinel lists anymore -- I'm still subscribed to P-L but not much comes out on it these days, and I bailed on all the fiction lists except for TLAD (which averages like two posts a month) ages ago. But today I suddenly took it into my head to go glance over new stories on 852 Prospect since I'd last checked ... which would be probably two years ago.

Things I found:

When I stopped reading unrecced stories in TS, Harry Potter fandom hadn't really made the big time. Not so now: BS Doesn't Always Stand for Blair Sandburg. Yep, that's right: this is a Harry Potter/Sentinel crossover. Even worse? Blair's a wizard. Worse than that? He's Severus Snape's love child. Severus. Snape's. Son. I just had to share the pain.

Predator, which demonstrates quite conclusively that the bad-anthro-theory fucked-up Sentinel serial-killer story is still alive and well. (If that's not an official genre in TS, it should be. It's why I adored cesperanza's Armchair so much.) Oh, and there's also In Deepest Consequence, which does the same for the one-of-the-other-cops-is-a-serial-killing-homophobe story. Whee?

Speaking of people who should have thought for a moment about reductio ad absurdum, or at the very least read one of cesperanza's stories (and I think y'all will instantly recognize which one I mean), I present The Littlest Guide, which features a two-year-old Blair bonding with ten-year-old Jim. I couldn't stand it long enough to skim for the plot, but I did read the first few paragraphs. On top of the basic two-year-old Blair problem, we have the "irritating baby talk" problem ("I no baby. I Blair. You mine. I you Guide. Sniff, now.") and the "spelling? grammar? pah!" problem (on one occasion, Blair is referred to as a "Guild") and the "indefinable Blair-ness of his scent" problem (Blair apparently smells like cinnamon and can release said scent on demand). *shudders*

Legion is still writing TS. Now, I think I first read one of her stories in ... 97? 98? Which makes that an incredibly long stay in a fandom. *is impressed*

Also? Through extensive skimming research, I have determined that Blair is now characterized as a screamer rather than a moaner. I don't know what this means, but that's someone else's job. (He still bounces, though. Constantly.)

***

*sighs* Oh, thank heavens.

I thought to myself "self, you have posted a most disturbing set of links, demonstrating that TS fandom still contains far too many 300K angst-o-ramas. Surely you must be able to find one good thing. Just one positive recommendation. That's all it'll take. Something to perk up your post."

And then I couldn't -- I started the first part of this post last Thursday. I scrolled back to January in 852 Prospect. I clicked on short stories and long stories and, really, anything that didn't have typos in the summary, and I bailed on almost all of them in the first sentence. Nothing! Nothing at all!

And now I have finally found something good and, though it's not a surprise, it's really the best I can do: jacquez wrote another installment in her Dog Tags series. The Illusionist is a good story. Sadly, it's a story by someone I've read and liked before, and thus really not what I was looking for at all, but at the moment? I'll take what I can get.